When Stanford falls asleep at night, the Daily house comes to life. Every Thursday, the office swells with laughter, pizza grease, the scratch of vinyls against an ancient record player and the collective groans that punctuate bad jokes made by good editors — and by the time the paper is mercifully out to print, it’s 1 a.m.
So many of our midnights were set at The Daily: both physically on its striped gray carpets, and mentally still there while far away from the newsroom. Some warm with fulfillment, others weighted with stressful pressure.
Perhaps it is appropriate that The Daily played such an outsized role across our time at Stanford, since we were first introduced to the newsroom by calling into Zroduction (Zoom production) from our childhood bedrooms. Every message from an editor to hop on Zroduction sparked slight dread — but over time, it was where we made our closest friends.
We met each other through a co-written article that was the first of many midnights spent together because of The Daily. As we poured over an article — started at 4 p.m. and published 12 hours later after dozens of phone calls to candidates running for local office — we should’ve known then that we were the kind of people who, three years later, would still find ways to spend long nights at the house.
Over the past several volumes, we’ve lost sleep and some idealism that pushed us through that initial article. Last year, we almost closed the chapter on our time at The Daily — we joked that we would dedicate our last year at Stanford to a joint advice column. To everyone’s surprise, including our own, we found ourselves spending our last two volumes as editor-in-chief and executive editor.
For two naive, impressionable frosh, the Kate Selig and Emma Talley School of Journalism was a lesson on the punctuation, patience and people that make The Daily what it is. For the two most argumentative people in every room, The Daily indulged our hyperfixations on the mundane — from commas, to hyphenation, to the random conversations we overhear outside CoHo.
Our most recent argument was over whether there was still such a thing as a novel senior column. The one throughline to our Stanford experiences has always been moving the goalposts on ourselves. It feels accurate, then, that we can’t write a perfect column or settle into a perfect lede.
As we’ve stepped into the roles held by the people we most admired, there’s a new sense of appreciation for the guidance that they gave us. We credit our mentors for inspiring our successes, but our blunders are entirely our own.
At times, The Daily felt like a lesson in what it meant to be part of something special. At other times, it felt like a lesson in all the ways a person could feel inadequate — as an editor, a mentor and a friend. But it was always a lesson. And, despite the incredible classes we’ve taken together, the professors we’ve grown close to and the research we’ve spent hours debating on our bedroom floors, it was at The Daily that we learned the most about ourselves over the last four years.
It was also where we encountered parts of campus we otherwise never would’ve gone to. At this newsroom, we learned how to care for others: as we turned the stories they shared with our reporters into narratives to present to our audience.
Last volume, we talked a lot about how The Daily will never matter as much to us as others, how sometimes, an article or situation that seemed catastrophic was, at least to some degree, a product of over-attachment. It’s heartwarming to see a new volume of Daily leadership care for this institution as much as we do, but we trust that they will learn to balance a commitment to the best version of every story, and every volume, with an understanding of when to step away.
Thank you to everyone who was a part of our last four years at this house that came to feel like home, with people who hurt and help you the way only family does — remember us at our best, and forgive us for our worst.
With love,
Kaushikee Nayudu
Editor-in-Chief, Volume 264 and 265
Jessica Zhu
Executive Editor, Volume 264 and 265
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